The pain of loss

There is something elementally devastating about Notes on Falling Leaves and the journey of imagining and empathy that Ayub Khan Din makes into the heart of dimness. The author, at the furthest emotional reach imaginable from his famous comedy East is East, thinks himself into the almost obliterated mind of Pam Ferris's mother, an incontinent, working-class woman in her early fifties and in the late stages of pre-senile dementia.

The stage is thick with autumn leaves. Ferris's utterly poignant mother, her walk a staggering lurch, face an infinite repertoire of vacant expressions, eyes intently fixed on nothing, lolls by a park bench. Ralf Little's mid-twenties son drifts down a stream of consciousness, which, in its recollection of a recent night with a girl in the deserted family home, sounds woefully contrived.

Yet it is the impact of Khan Din's writing, with its wonderful, Beckettian evocation of a mind struggling to comprehend the loss of its own faculties and the running down of the self, that makes Notes on Falling Leaves astonishingly painful and strange. Ferris speaks in halting jumbles of words and repetitions by which Khan Din charts the woman's gradual, magical emerging from foggy blankness to express loving connectedness. "My me has gone," she laments. It feels akin to sitting by the death-bed of someone in the throes of last thoughts. And of course, in a sense, it is just that.

There are, though, incursions of self-conscious poeticising that detract from the 55-minute play's forcefulness and limit its scaring authenticity. Khan Din also deprives the piece of the crucial elements of development and tension by dismissing the son rear-stage after he begins to imagine his mother's thoughts. We need to observe at close hand how Little, who lacks real emotional voltage and tonal variety, will react to the mother's struggle to express herself.

Marianne Elliott's production is rooted in a mood of glum dejection and fails to persuade the actors to convey Khan Din's moods of passionate longing, reminscence and regret.